Review:

on 2011-09-29 CharlesMartel Said:

I confess to having long struggled with hip-hop. The albums which are so often cited as classics - "Illmatic", "Fear of a Black Planet", "Enter the Wu-Tang" - frankly appall me. Too often the genre is associated with misogynistic, homophobic sentiments glorifying lifestyles which should not be glorified. In particular, I have a problem with the use, by some, including some of the best, of the N word. That heinous term has been banished from respectable usage, only to resurface again as term of endearment by the very people who should have abhorred it most. But content apart, I frequently found that a lot of hip-hop struggled to maintain a flow without twisting the stress of the words to force them into a pattern. I cannot abide language being mangled because someone is too lazy or too incompetent (or both) to string words together according to their natural flow.

As a consequence, I own very few hip hop albums. There are some I can listen to, but for the most part I avoid it to avoid irritating and being irritated. But I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the finest hip-hop album ever released, in my humble opinion, is "Absence" by Dalek.

Too many hip-hop albums are unsubtle by virtue of the fact that they explode with obscene expressions of misanthropic attitude in a deliberate attempt to shock. "Absence" is unsubtle in a different way. The opening monologue of the first track, "Distorted Prose" provides no clue. But when the music kicks in, well this is hip-hop like you've never heard it before. Thundering, heavy basslines seep out of the bottom of your speakers, while distorted screeching pries apart the small bones of your inner ear. Yet once you are over the shock, you can settle down and slowly absorb the sound as it ceases to be atonal and jarring and with each listen takes on a quality of its own with familiarity, a warmth almost. Warm maybe, but never comfortable.

This is hip-hop meets industrial; hip-hop meets shoegaze; this is hip-hop meets horror punk. And in each case, hip-hop wins out. Those hip-hop artists who think they are frightening (white) people with their swearing, their glorification of the drug-tainted life of the ghetto and their pseudo-revolutionary mouthings have nothing on this. If you want hip-hop to frighten the crap out of you, then "Absence" is what you need. But it's not just the music, oh no. Dalek (the man) has something to say. He gets his lyrics across clearly and without needless shock value. Yet those same lyrics are pointed and do not pull punches. His targets are politics, society, religion, war. George W. Bush is lambasted; Reagan is blamed for starting it; the Iraq War is condemned as a Christian Jihad which will bleed the poor; religion has become what Marx always said it was, the opium of the masses. Even that awful moment which shaped so much of America's reaction to the world, and the world's reaction to America in the first decade of the 21st century, 9/11, gets seen through different eyes on "Eyes to Form Shadows":

"That pathetic premise of freedom is false
Futility of earthly flesh answers death's solemn call
Within these very words lie my ancestral tongue
I kept breath within collapsed left lung
As I witnessed modern tower of Babel come undone
These bloodshot eyes surmise that most meaning is lost."

This is powerful stuff indeed, made all the more so because it is delivered almost as a prophetic message. This is not going to shock you because it is delivered in a shocking way - this will shock you for the right reason: lucid, rational, calm, disturbing.

"Ever Sombre" (excuse my need to spell properly) is probably the highlight. A grim melody begins to peer through the opacity of sound. The swirling backing track laid down by Still and Oktopus becomes majestic as the track proceeds as Dalek's lyrics proceed to encompass seemingly everything that is wrong with everything. This is about as far from the crass sermonizing of Nas and Public Enemy as you can get, never mind the pathetic pop-rap of Kanye West and Sean Combes.

And that is at the heart of what makes "Absence" so compelling. This is not what you have come to expect from hip-hop. If you are looking for something bland and familiar which will shock and offend, but only within the confines of your comfort zone, then don't come here. "Absence" is hip-hop for people who don't like hip-hop. And once you have heard this, your feelings towards hip-hop and the fate of the western world, America especially, will never be the same again.
Rating: 8/10